


Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando

by 6textania



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Light Angst, Other Characters Are Mentioned, VLR timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28409580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/6textania/pseuds/6textania
Summary: Doctor Klim faces a mishap in the AB Project. Akane rolls her eyes and asks him to take a seat.
Kudos: 7





	Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando

"Shit," Dr Klim pounded his gloved hands onto the steel wall. "Shit, shit, shit."

As if every pound he gave translated into _shit_ , he continued to mutter angrily in his office. A dozen papers sat on the desk -- papers were rare, and Akane wanted to splurge a little -- all touched by ink. He'd much rather keep his thoughts in his head and archive it somewhere in his brain to dig out later, and expensive papers were stupid all the while.

Akane squinted a little, faint wrinkles of now the fifty-something-year-old appearing between her eyebrows. "What's the matter?"

"GAULEM Type Female. Diana Model." the Doctor grunted, swears under his breath dying in the silence. Hephaestus Models had sent a frustratingly cryptic message, outlining how the ABT process reached a mishap. Doctor Klim was not a man of mishaps, and every bump in the road would slow the project. His GAULEMs in Rhizome-9 were all framework, and did the job well. G-OLM was his favourite, since he was the first and, regrettably, only one who thought and talked like a human.

But, Diana Model was remarkably different from the GAULEMs here, G-OLM, and anything he'd worked on. The doors were fine. Arranging Lagomorph's AI was fine. But Diana Model -- she would have to be physically perfect, the intelligence had to be of the best. Not only to perfection but to accuracy. She would have to walk, to talk, to act just like Diana. It was a challenge to play God and create a robot in the exact image of Diana.

Akane had nothing to touch upon regarding the subject. She never did, unless the Doctor dragged her into the unfamiliar waters. "You understand, right? The AB Project--" her hand waved to pause him in his speech. "The AB Project is just your excuse to solve your longing for the woman you had loved." The first time Sigma had met Akane -- _this_ Akane, from this timeline -- she was nothing more than a young woman, though all the dangerous, yet had nothing to mark her authority. With age, she had gotten frighteningly wiser and dangerous, like an antique made of lead. Twenty-something years ago, Sigma might have stepped up on Akane's all too correct claim, but now he hung his head in sluggish shame.

"But you'd understand." said the Doctor. He pressed further, despite the weight of Akane's sunken eyes on him. "You'd lost many you've loved. You'd probably want to _recreate_ them, to fill in the loneliness they left you."

"I would use the AB Project to act upon that want. Just like you did." she brought her hands before her body, right hand with the ring over the empty left. "Everything must go towards this goal. Or else, what is the point?"

_"Happiness is closer than you think. But as soon as you think you found happiness, you lose it again."_

Doctor Klim rolled his eye in anger to the motif she abused.

Akane paid his glare only with her lifting her head in assertion. "We are in the timeline where the virus escaped. Inflicting pain, suffering and disaster to the whole world. I lost many that I cared about. You have, too. Yet, if we were to recreate all of that just like _that_ ," she snaps her fingers, right hand, "it would be all for naught. In a sense, we are recreating every beat of a better future. But that is for our true loved ones, not a clone, and not a robot," Kyle and Diana Model, 'Luna', Klim inferred -- they were both just for the AB Project. That was what Akane was strictly implying. "Not everything is materialistic, Doctor. You can't ever replicate love, or hope, or time--"

"Enough, Akane--"

There was no point in crying over what couldn't be changed.

Sigma cried in the hollow silence, left alone to only himself and his mind. He'd been lying, claiming that he would put everything into this project. But the Doctor was nothing more that a _coward_ , so craving to bring Diana back to life in a robot that will never be the same as her, no matter how many countless sketches and calculations he plans out across both lengths of his stretch of desk. He'd been lying to himself, driven to get up and work all for a lie he blanketed over with the damn AB Project. With a silent, metallic sting of the bluebird, he was alone.

_Fate, and the dooming gods, are deaf to tears._

Elsewhere, Akane clung to a photograph of her brother, and to June.

**Author's Note:**

> short, but!! i live for sigma pre VLR. there were a few other things i wanted to touch upon, but i didnt want any unnecessary blabbering, and i quite like this bare style :)
> 
> 759 words. 7 + 5 + 9 --> 21 --> 2 + 1 = 3
> 
> o.0 aoi confirmed


End file.
